Amazon has agreed to acquire Indian video streaming service MX Player from local media company Times Internet, the latest step by the e-commerce giant to popularize its services and brand in smaller cities and towns in its key overseas market.
The two companies reached a definitive agreement on the deal Wednesday afternoon, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The deal values MX Player at less than $100 million, well below the $500 million valuation at which the streamer raised its last round of capital, the source told TechCrunch, speaking on condition of anonymity because the companies have yet to publicly comment on the deal. .
The deal caps a nearly two-year consultation between the two companies as they sought to find synergies between their properties. Times Internet and its subsidiary Times Group have been trying to sell many of their digital properties for the past two years.
TechCrunch reported in February of last year that Amazon and MX Player had entered into a deal. Sony, which has also been trying to merge its India unit with media house Zee, has also expressed interest in acquiring MX Player, but complications with the Zee deal derailed its efforts, according to various sources familiar with the matter. .
In MX Player, Amazon is getting a distribution and marketing partner that can help make the e-commerce platform more popular and trusted by audiences in India’s smaller cities and towns, a source familiar with Amazon’s strategy told TechCrunch. MX Player is particularly popular among such demographics, and Amazon’s e-commerce service has long been popular only with urban consumers. Amazon will keep the MX Player brand, the source said.
Amazon and Times Internet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Amazon has expanded its video streaming offerings in India to make noise outside metro cities. The company charges just $9.50 a year for a variant of the Prime subscription that includes a version of Prime Video. It also maintains several partnerships with local telecom operators for Prime Video bundle with their tariffs. In 2021, Amazon launched an additional free, but ad-supported, video streaming service in India.
Reliance, which runs the country’s largest retail chain, leads the video streaming services market in India with Disney. The two companies agreed to merge media in India at the end of February. Together, their apps had 55% of the monthly active users of all video streaming services in India. MX Player had a 15% market share, according to UBS. Netflix and Prime Video had a market share of between 3-5% each, the investment bank said.
Times Internet acquired MX Player in 2018 for $140 million. The app, which was launched from South Korea, has gained immense popularity in India due to its unique local video playback feature. This feature allows the app to support a wide range of video file formats, making it highly compatible with budget Android smartphones prevalent in developing markets.
After the acquisition, Times Internet made strategic moves to transform MX Player from a local video player application into a comprehensive video streaming platform. The company invested in filling the app with a wide range of licensed and original content, including TV shows, movies and games, to meet the growing demand for online entertainment in India — and in many international markets, including the UK and US
In response to the Indian government’s ban on the popular short video app TikTok in mid-2020, MX Player also tried to seize the opportunity and launched its own short video app (called MX TakaTak) to fill the gap in the market . Times Internet later sold the short video app to ShareChat, a leading Indian social media platform in a deal valued at over $650 million.
